‘Touch’: A Man Tries to Find His First Love, 50 Years Later
The Icelandic filmmaker Baltasar Kormákur has been assembling an unusually compelling career as a Hollywood journeyman. He made a couple of Mark Wahlberg vehicles (Contraband and the Denzel Washington buddy comedy 2 Guns) before pivoting to the natural disaster space, where movies from Everest to Adrift to Beast have merged a certain grown-up, character-based sensibility with the élan of pulpy showmanship.
Beast, for example, is a lion-attack thriller featuring a number of unobtrusively single-take sequences. (In between these American movies, he directed and starred in Iceland’s most popular release of 2016, playing a dad who tries to disappear his daughter’s troublesome boyfriend. In other words, he may have fashioned himself his own Liam Neeson vehicle.)
Touch, his new Icelandic project, is less formally ambitious and more narratively complex. Based on a novel by Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson, who co-authored the adaptation with Kormákur, Touch cuts back and forth between an older man named Kristófer (Egill Ólafsson) and his younger self (Palmi Kormakur). In 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic is starting to shut down the world, Kristófer sets off in search of an “old friend,” who, we see in the flashback sections set 50 years earlier, is his ex, Miko (Kōki). They meet in London when Kristófer, disillusioned with his studies, gets a job at the Japanese restaurant owned by Miko’s father. The movie generates a bittersweet suspense over how, exactly, the pair’s slow-burning romance will be cut short, and whether 2020 Kristófer will find Miko again.